Chimps can mourn, and Bigfoot knows what your thinking

Link to photo info

The November issue of National Geographic magazine features a moving photograph of chimpanzees watching as one of their own is wheeled to her burial. Since it was published, the picture and story have gone viral, turning up on websites and TV shows and in newspapers around the world. For readers who’d like to know more, here’s what I learned when I interviewed the photographer, Monica Szczupider.

Apes Feel Your Pain
by Sharon Begley
There's new evidence that primates can read human emotions.

Memo to zoo visitors making faces at the chimps and gorillas on the other side of the glass: they know what you're thinking. Or, more precisely, feeling.
The extent and limits of ape intelligence is a hot area in science, but most of the research has focused on cognition. Now a team of scientists has turned the spotlight on emotions, and how well apes can read the human kind as displayed in our facial expressions. Earlier studies had shown that apes understand people's goals and perceptions. But whether apes understand our emotional expressions was pretty much a mystery, even though there are striking similarities between the facial expressions that we and our more hirsute cousins make, as researchers as far back as Darwin noted. Both human babies and newborn chimps make a pouting face to get mom’s attention, for instance, and bare their teeth in something like a smile in order to make nice—or "achieve social bonding," as primatologists put it.

A cool paper in the September issue of the journal Developmental Science describes studies on 17 chimps, five bonobos, five gorillas and five orangutans from the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center in Leipzig, Germany. In the first test, a researcher sat at a table on one side of a plexiglass panel while an ape sat on the other side. Two opaque boxes rested on the table. The scientist opened one box (making sure the ape could not see inside) and smiled with pleasure. He next opened the other and made a disgusted face. The ape was then allowed to reach through one of the holes in the panel and pick one box. Which would he choose?

In 57 percent of the tests, the ape chose the box that elicited a smile from the scientist rather than an expression of disgust. Good choice. The box that brought the smile contained a grape, and the ape was rewarded for his perspicacity in reading human facial expressions. The other box contained dead cockroaches. The apes' skill at reading an expression of happiness, write David Buttelmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and his colleagues, indicates that they can read meaning in the emotional expressions on human faces, suggesting that despite 6 million years of separate evolution apes and humans share a common emotional language. (It's always interesting to compare apes to babies: human infants can read facial expressions and act on them at around 14 to 18 months.)
In the next experiments, the set-up with the plexiglass was the same. An ape saw the scientist hold up a grape and a slice of banana, but his view was then blocked as the scientist put one treat under one cup and the other under the other cup. The ape then watched as the scientist looked under each of the two cups in turn, making an expression of happiness at one and of disgust at the other. The scientist next reached under one cup (at this point, the ape's view was again blocked, so he could not see which cup the scientist chose) and ate what was inside. His view restored, the ape saw the scientist munching on something, and then was allowed to choose a cup for himself.

This time the apes tended to choose the cup that had triggered the expression of disgust. Counterintuitive? Not at all. The apes went beyond the simplistic "pick cup that elicited happy face" to make a fairly sophisticated computation. That is, they seemed to reason that the human would eat the food that made him smile, emptying that cup, with the result that only the disgust-inducing cup would still contain a snack.

That was even stronger evidence than in the first test that the apes understood the meaning of the human's facial expression, and were not simplistically equating "disgust" with "stay away from this cup." Their skill at inferring how people will act on their emotions, conclude the scientists, suggests that they "understand facial expressions as expressing internal states that cause certain [human] actions—in this case, eating one food but not another." The apes had to understand that expressions of disgust or happiness reflect an internal state that people will then act on, and infer that the person was more likely to eat the food that made him look happy. Species did not matter—chimps, gorillas, and the others all did about the same—but age did: the older the animal, the better he did. Call it the wisdom of old age.

In my recent story describing the rising criticism of evolutionary psychology and the idea of human universals, I noted that emotions and emotional expression do seem to be universals (unlike, say, rape). If so, that suggests that emotional expressions have deep evolutionary roots, perhaps reaching as far back as the common ancestors of humans and modern apes. That possibility looks even more likely as evidence accumulates that apes can read the emotions on our faces.
© 2009

Global Warming = Bigfoot Migrates North

Dont take my word for it! There are specialist in a unique scientific discipline called Ecological Niche Modeling (ENM)

Using a database of sightings and footprints for Bigfoot in western North America, the researchers suggest that convincing distributions of an animals range can be generated from questionable data. By comparing the distribution of Bigfoot to that of a black bear, Lozier et al. “suggest that many sightings of this cryptozoid may be cases of mistaken identity.”

The algorithms take information about sightings or recorded incidences of a species, find commonalities among those sightings against maps of other ecological data (i.e rainfall, forest type, presence of other species, etc.), and produce a geographic distribution for the target species.

The paper, “Predicting the distribution of Sasquatch in western North America: anything goes with ecological niche modelling,” constructs ecological niche models (ENMs) for the elusive Bigfoot. By using a large database of georeferenced sightings and footprints for Sasquatch in western North America, Lozier and his colleagues aim to demonstrate how convincing environmentally predicted distributions of a taxon’s potential range can be generated from questionable site-occurrence data. Lozier et al. do not take an explicit stance on the existence of Bigfoot, but rather make use of publicly available data sets with questionable records to illustrate the danger of using incomplete data to make statistical correlations.


Read a full article from NATURE below.

Bigfoot study highlights habitat modelling flaws
Accurate prediction of climate change's effects is as elusive as the fabled apeman.


John Whitfield


Climate change, it turns out, is going to be a mixed blessing for the sasquatch. The legendary American apeman will lose some of its existing habitat in the coastal and lowland regions of the northwestern United States, but gain a lot of new land in the Rocky Mountains and Canada.

So say biologist Jeff Lozier of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his colleagues, in an analysis just published in theJournal of Biogeography¹. But they're not really worried about bigfoot. Instead, they're trying to warn their colleagues that ecological models are only as good as the data that go into them.

Lozier's team subjected bigfoot to a technique called ecological niche modelling. This involves taking records of where a species has been found, and then, by combining these with environmental data, deducing where it ought to live or has lived in the past, present or future.

Such models are among the main tools in efforts to predict and plan for the biological effects of climate change. And because their predictions can be displayed as intuitive and dramatic maps, they have a psychological power beyond most scientific graphics.

Mistaken identity

But researchers' enthusiasm for such analyses risks outpacing their understanding of them, says Lozier. "The method is really new, and it's not fully worked out. I think some people have been seduced by the pretty output."

“We were trying to do the same thing for the yeti.”

One problem is misidentification. It's hard to judge whether someone really saw what they thought they saw where they saw it, particularly in less well-studied groups such as insects — or American apemen. Mistake one species for another, for example, and your model will mislead.

Such errors can be hard to spot, because even if all the data are all highly dubious, a model based on them can still give a plausible-looking result, as Lozier and his colleagues found when they analysed sightings recorded by the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization.

The reported sightings imply that the wooded and mountainous areas of California, Oregon and Washington teem with sasquatch at present. Warm the climate, and, like many other species, it will probably move north and uphill.

"It's a perfect commentary on the potential problems of this approach," says Lozier. "Plus, it's a sasquatch paper."

No crystal ball

Unlikely as it sounds, Lozier's paper scooped work by another group. "We were trying to do the same thing for the yeti," says ecologist Carsten Rahbek of the University of Copenhagen. Like Lozier, he wanted to show that models could turn dubious data into plausible-looking predictions.

A few years ago, only a few labs had the expertise to do ecological niche models. But now they are accessible to just about everyone, thanks to online data sources and user-friendly modelling software.

Much of the resulting work is "very naive", says Rahbek. "I'm editor-in-chief of a journal (Ecography) that gets a lot of these studies, and we reject nine out of ten."

Misidentification isn't even the biggest problem with these models, says ecologist Joaquin Hortal of Imperial College London. More important is bias: if researchers only collect along roads, for example, then models will suggest that the species lives only along roads. "Biodiversity data [are] usually environmentally and spatially biased," he says.

Even if accurate data go in, a model's predictions of where species will go, and which are most at risk of extinction, will be imprecise and uncertain. "We in the modelling community need to be a bit more humble about how precise our predictions are, and acknowledge the errors of estimates, which are huge, more than we do," says Rahbek. "It's just damn hard to predict the future."

So if you need to be cautious about ecological niche models' inputs and you can't be certain about their outputs, are they any use at all? Yes, says Rahbek, because their predictions show consistent trends, such as European wildlife moving north and east as the climate warms. If the data were all random noise, then the predictions would be, too. 

• References

  1. Lozier, J. D., Aniello, P. & Hickerson, M. J. J. Biogeogr. published online. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2699.2009.02152.x (2009).

RELATED LINKS
Paper on Ecological Niche Modeling of Bigfoot

Bigfoot and the Indiana Banana

Is the Rise in Paw Paw (AKA Indiana Banana) trees and Bigfoot Sightings Correlated?

For those not familiar with the Paw Paw (Asimina Adans.), it is a fruit tree native to eastern North America. Historically, this fruit was never cultivated in the way that other fruit trees have, such as the apple, pear or peach trees; however, recent interest in the paw paw’s nutritional, medicinal, and insecticidal properties has peaked farmers’ interest in this delicious and potentially marketable crop. The paw paw has been referred to with many names - the Indiana Banana, Poor Man’s Banana, papaw, Kentucky Banana – to name a few. If you were from the Midwest or any other place that the paw paw is native to, it was always a treat to come across a neighbor or a market stand that had this custard-like treat on hand. Bigfoot most likely feels the same way.

In recent years, the cultivation of the paw paw has increased. Organic farmers grow it not only for its sweet taste, but also for its insecticidal qualities. Freezing the pulp upon harvest now combats storing and shipping the fruit, which was once a hindrance. It is also relatively low maintenance once cultivated.

Bigfoot and the paw paw? Bigfoot sightings do not just occur in Oregon and Washington. The BFRO (The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization) has a great list of sightings per state. Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and many other states have dozens of sightings (for a great listing check out http://www.bfro.net/gdb/#usa) Members of the Bigfoot Researchers Lunch Club believe that Bigfoot may very well have an interest in the paw paw for subsistence and that sightings in these states, as well as others where the paw paw is being grown, directly correlate to this crop. Like the numerous sightings in states with heavy apple and pear production, Washington and Oregon, the states with increasing paw paw production are seeing more and more Bigfoot sightings.
Ohio is currently the biggest producer of the paw paw. It also has had an astonishing number of Bigfoot sightings – 198 reported to the BFRO through 2007. Other states producing the fruit have had many reports of Bigfoot as well. Michigan - 85 sighting, Kentucky – 47 sightings, Indiana – 49 sightings. The states producing the paw paw and the sightings reported in these states warrant all of you field researchers in these states to explore this possibility. We of the BFRLC would love to hear your opinions, thoughts, and research regarding this issue. We invite you to share your stories with us.